by Aiden Bates
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Bonus Chapter Sixteen
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Together Again
Aiden Bates
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Preview Chapter: Deliver Me
Bonus Chapter Sixteen
The story may be over but
Chapter One
Elias shook hands with Agent Fredericks. "I'm glad that we could resolve this case so quickly, and so well," he said. Maybe "well" wasn't the right way to put it. The parents were getting back a traumatized kid who was going to be scarred for life, mentally and physically. At least they were getting the kid back, he supposed. And he'd met the Wilkersons several times; if there had ever been a family with the heart and strength to help a kid heal, they were it.
Agent Fredericks shook his hand. "Honestly, we couldn't have done it without you and HomeSafe. You guys are absolutely top of the food chain when it comes to missing kids." She shook her head. "How do you guys manage it?"
Elias grinned. "To be honest, it's because it's all we do. We only work on missing kids, day in and day out. It's a grind, don't get me wrong, but it does allow us to help law enforcement in ways that they might not be able to do on their own." He stretched. The hotel bed hadn't been kind to him.
"So, where's home for you?" Fredericks walked out of the building with him.
"I have a place in Providence. I'm not there very often." He chuckled. "I should probably sell it, to be honest, but I have to have some address to put on my tax returns, right? Seriously, though. I'm all over the place."
"That sounds…" She made a face but bit her lip; clearly stopping herself before she could say too much. "I mean I travel a lot, but I do come home first." She wrinkled her nose. "You must not have kids, then."
Elias could see his car in the distance. He focused on that, instead of on his memories. The last thing that he needed right now was to remember the smell of his own blood, or his own insides, in the hospital. He still remembered those, sometimes. "No. I don't. Can't, actually." That wasn't necessarily true. The doctors had slipped a "probably" in there somewhere, but that wasn't important right now.
"I'm sorry." She put her hand over her mouth. "That was incredibly callous of me."
He waved a hand. "Don't worry about it. It was a long time ago." That wasn't a lie. It had been a long time ago, ten years, and yet he could still remember every detail. "Anyway, you have a safe trip back to Quantico."
"You drive safe now! Where exactly are you headed to next?" She knit her blonde brows together.
Elias opened his mouth to respond, and then he scratched his head. He never worried about where he was going, until he had to be there. "I have no idea," he admitted. "I got a message while we were in that press conference, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and listen to it yet."
"Oh. Well, drive safe!" Fredericks waved goodbye, and Elias slipped into his car.
He pulled out his phone and called his boss back. "Hey, Dagmar, what's up? I saw you called while I was in that conference with the locals."
Dagmar cleared her throat. "How do you feel about taking on another case so soon?"
Elias rolled his eyes. How was he supposed to feel about taking on a case? His title was investigator. That was what it said on his business cards—Investigative Analyst. What else was he supposed to do, sit around for a week and do yoga or something? "I feel fine taking on another case, Dagmar," he told her. He tried to keep his voice from sounding condescending. "That's why I'm here."
She chuckled at him. "Glad to hear it, Elias. If it makes you feel any better, this one's in Boston. You can stay in a hotel on-site if you want, or you can work from your own place back in Providence."
Elias choked on his own breath. "Boston, Massachusetts?"
Dagmar laughed, just a little. "Uh, yeah, tiger. Where did you think I meant, if you had the option to work out of your place in Providence?"
For a moment, just a moment, Pat's face sprang to mind. That was absurd, of course. Plenty of guys went into the police academy. That didn't mean that Pat would even be in the same jurisdiction as this case, never mind have both made detective and be assigned to this case. "Sorry. I lived in Boston for a while."
"I know. That was part of the appeal, to be honest. You're familiar with the area, and you speak both Spanish and Portuguese. I think that's going to come in fairly handy. Are you okay with going back?"
"Yeah. Yeah, of course. There's nothing I won't do for a kid, you know?" He tugged at the collar of his shirt. "What should I know?"
"Well, for starters, we're dealing with a dead kid here. I'll send you the case file. It's—well, it's weird, Elias. You'll be working with the State Police on this one. Their Cold Case unit is working with the Abused Persons unit together on it. It's too weird to explain over the phone; you have to read it to believe it."
He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yeah. Okay. I'll head out tomorrow morning, it'll be about a fourteen-hour drive."
"Take the day after off, do some laundry or something. Or don't try to do a drive like that in one day all by yourself. The cops will still be going over tape and everything. Read the file, Elias. This isn't going to be a quick job."
"No." Elias wouldn't be that lucky. "I'll call you with any questions, Dagmar."
"Talk to you later, sweetie." Dagmar hung up.
Elias headed back to his hotel. He had a lot of driving to do tomorrow; he might as well read the file now.
It took him about five minutes to realize that this case wasn't going to be like any other case that he'd ever seen. The body of a ten-year-old boy had been found, neatly wrapped in a white sheet, just inside the doorway of an abandoned hotel in Boston. While the boy was naked under the sheet, there was no indication of sexual trauma; the sheet appeared to be something more along the lines of a traditional shroud than anything else. The child appeared to have been well-cared-for, although not overfed by any stretch of the imagination. He'd been found yesterday.
Today, the medical examiner found that John Doe had died from diphtheria.
Someone from the State Police Crime Lab had taken the initiative to scan not only the boy's fingerprints, but his footprints too. Elias wouldn't have asked for that. Diphtheria was easily preventable, with vaccines. He wouldn't have expected someone who had neglected to vaccinate their child to have bothered to register his footprints in any kind of database. Of course, he'd hardly have expected people who let their child die from a perfectly preventable illness to have wrapped their k
id up in a shroud like that. He wouldn't have expected people who wrapped their child nicely in a shroud to dump the body in an abandoned hotel, either.
So many contradictions. Or maybe Elias was moving too quickly to judgment. It was an occupational hazard.
The footprints had, in fact, been stored in a database, which had provided an identity for the child. That identity was of little help.
Scott Gilbert, five months of age, had been snatched from his mother's shopping cart in a grocery store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, ten years ago. He hadn't been seen since, not until he'd turned up dead from something that had been curable since the turn of the last century.
A chill ran over Elias' body. Someone had taken him and raised him, and then dumped him like trash.
He pushed the thought from his mind. He had to stay objective. He couldn't let his anger cloud his judgment or he'd never find the culprit. That wasn't an acceptable outcome. If the perpetrator had stolen a child, for whatever reasons, they would do it again. Elias had to stop them before it was too late.
He packed up his things, leaving out only what he would need before leaving in the morning. He even slept in the nude, so that he wouldn't have to worry about packing up his pajamas. Someone else might have laughed at him for that, but it had been a while since there had been anyone to laugh at his travel habits.
He wasn't going to think about that. Instead, he was going to pack up his computer. He'd turn on the TV and try to think about just about anything else—anything other than the case, anything other than the life he'd left behind in Massachusetts. He drifted off to sleep while watching a documentary about ancient Roman engineering feats, and dreaming about aqueducts and coliseums.
When he woke up, he dressed quickly and hit the road as soon as he could. Bardstown was nice enough. It wasn't so nice that he wanted to linger, especially not with a fourteen-hour drive ahead of him. He found a place to get breakfast and coffee, and then he hopped onto the Bluegrass Parkway heading east.
Even all the coffee in the world couldn't keep his mind from wandering as he drove north and east. It would have been impossible under any circumstances, but to ask it when he was heading back to Massachusetts was just absurd. He knew that there was no chance of running into Pat again. How many cops were there in Massachusetts? The odds that Pat had become a State Trooper, and was now a detective, were so small as to be minuscule.
But what if?
Elias wasn't a "what-if" kind of guy. He dealt in facts. The only "what-if" he liked to see was hypothesis testing. What if the child didn't run away, but was taken? What if the child wasn't taken, but got lost? But when he was stuck in a car for fourteen hours, with no companion and no hope of distraction, he couldn't fight the pull of his brain.
What if he and Pat hadn't split up?
What an absurd question. Elias and Pat were always going to split up. They would never have lasted. Pat's ego couldn't tolerate being with a partner who had more resources than he did. His masculinity, and his identity as an alpha, had been too threatened. All that Elias had ever wanted to do was to help him, but Pat couldn't allow that.
Anger lanced through him, like a stab wound. Why would it have been the end of the world for Pat to just let Elias help? It wouldn't have been more than a drop in the bucket, for crying out loud. Had Elias really meant so little to him?
He snorted as he passed from Kentucky into West Virginia. He truly hadn't meant much to Pat. They'd gone their separate ways. Pat hadn't even taken long to move his stuff out. He'd told Elias that he was leaving, Elias had replied with some choice words before class, and by the time he came back Pat's stuff was just gone. He hadn't called to talk or to check in or anything. He hadn't passed on a forwarding address, either.
Not that Elias had wanted him to. Elias hadn't reached out either. Pat had meant the world to him, but he hadn't reached out and hadn't tried to bring him back. The breakup had happened, and that was it. When Elias' world had sent him reeling a few weeks later, he hadn't called, even though he should have.
And when his world came crashing down, he hadn't called him either. Why bother?
He wasn't going to see Pat again, and most of him didn't want to see Pat again. Sure, he'd loved Pat, but that chapter of his life was over. Too much had happened in the years since, and he wasn't that naive young man who thought that love would be enough to bridge everything that divided them.
Part of him, though, would not stop asking, what if?
What would he do if he saw Pat? How would he react? What would Pat see? Would he see a bitter, broken-down old omega who no one wanted now that he couldn't give them children anymore? Or would he see a tall, strong, confident man who didn't need Patrício Tessaro, and never actually had? Which version did Elias want him to see?
And how would Elias cope when Pat refused to be moved by either one?
The thought weighed him down as he cruised through Maryland, and then Pennsylvania. Elias had always been the one to need Pat, never the other way around. Hell, Pat probably didn't even remember him.
As he crossed the border into New Jersey, Elias rolled his shoulders. He wasn't here to moon around over lost love. Elias did good work, damn it. He saved lives. He brought families closure. Maybe he was still alone, but he was going to leave a legacy behind him that outshone the sun itself. He didn't need to go mooning around after some guy whose middle name was probably Pride.
He pulled into his parking spot at the condo complex and hauled his bags upstairs. He hadn't been home in over a month. Nothing looked any different; he didn't expect it to. The whole condo looked like a large hotel suite. For a moment, the emptiness got to him.
Then he roused himself out of it. He had tomorrow off. He would call the Cold Case and Abused Persons units in the morning and schedule time for a meeting. Until then, though, his time was his own. The fact that a certain someone hadn't wanted to share it with him just meant that he was at complete liberty to do as he pleased.
He ran himself a bubble bath, because he could. He opened himself a bottle of champagne, and after a moment's thought he brought the bottle into the tub along with a flute. He got himself a book from his shelf, a popular biography about Alexander Hamilton, and tossed his laundry into the pile in the corner. Tonight was for him, and he was going to unwind.
He pulled himself out of the tub when his mood had improved enough, and when he started to feel the danger involved in getting too attached to his bottle of champagne. He rinsed himself off, got dry, and headed for the bedroom.
Outside his window, the city of Providence bustled on in the blustery autumn night. Providence was a good place to be, he figured. It was far enough away from Boston that it had its own identity, but close enough that he could get into the larger city if he wanted to. Hell, he could get into New York if the mood so took him. He liked it here. He'd chosen it as a base for a reason, after all.
Maybe there were some good sides to getting assigned to a job in his home area after all. He rolled over and closed his eyes, a little smile playing across his face.
***
Pat sat and watched as Robles and Nenci verbally sparred over the Montague case. He knew what was really going on there. Neither one of them wanted to work the dead kid case, so they were trying like hell to work any other case that Devlin might see fit to open up for them.
He guessed that he could see their point of view. He didn't want to work the dead kid case either. The fact of the matter was, though, that someone had to work the dead kid case. Scott Gilbert, he reminded himself. He couldn't just think of the victim as some random dead kid. They were victims, they had been people, and they deserved respect even in the privacy of his thoughts.
They deserved names, damn it.
Someone was going to have to work the Scott Gilbert case, and none of the guys on the squad were going to have the first thing to say about it. Devlin was going to assign who he was going to assign, for reasons of his own, and that was all there was to it. He wouldn't assign Robles
to it, because Ryan Tran from Abused Persons was already on the case and Robles and Tran were mated. They also couldn't work a case together without needing to be forcibly separated, so that meant that Robles got a pass this time.
Nenci turned to look at Pat. "What's up with you, Tessaro?"
Pat leaned back in his chair. "What do you mean, 'what's up with me?' Nothing's up with me. My life is profoundly dull."
Robles snorted. "Dull my ass. Didn't you go home with two omegas last week?"
Pat scoffed. "Okay, maybe 'dull' has more than one meaning. What does that have to do with anything?" He shook his head. "Besides, you know I'm not going to kiss and tell. You're the one with the lifetime commitment; you don't get to live vicariously through me."
Robles flipped him off. "Someday you're going to fall, and you're going to fall hard. And I'm going to be right there to laugh my ass off."
Pat chuckled. "You keep watching, Robles. You keep waiting. Never going to happen."
Nenci winked at him. "Ah, so the big man around town is too cool for love, huh?"
